KELLY SHAMI

is a New York-based artist. Shami earned a BFA from The School of Visual Arts in 2013. She is a first-generation American artist of Syrian and Lebanese descent who describes her subjects through a language made from an obsession with differences.

Shami’s intriguing paintings routinely combine the natural and unnatural; she finds parallels between the restraints of growing up as an Arab woman to the restraints placed upon the first female Surrealists. Shami evokes complex emotionalities of liveliness and control through visuals of flowers altered with piercings. Initially delicate, these oil paintings exist as a series of complex self portraits that, through the rendered metallic surfaces of the piercings, create a mirrored effect that encourages viewers to self-reflect.